Sprint Retrospective

Thu 02 Jul 2015 00:10

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An experienced Scrum team may have completed many successful projects. It may also be implementing Scrum effectively. The team might be perfect from every point of view. However, Scrum principles suggest there is always a scope of improving upon the work process to make it even better, and even more efficient. The “inspect” and “adapt” principles help to generate inputs that are very important in the improvement process. Scrum dedicates a special event to support these principles. The event is called sprint retrospective meeting. Some experts also refer to the meeting as a Scrum retrospective.

A sprint retrospective can be thought about as a “lessons learned” type of meeting. During the meeting, the team thinks about how everything worked out in the sprint just completed. It tries to retrospect and evaluate the outcomes of the sprint. The event is team driven and the entire team participates in it. The team decides how the retrospective should be held and how it should proceed. A healthy atmosphere fostering trust and sharing of ideas should ideally prevail in the meeting. The members should feel comfortable while contributing their ideas and sharing them with other team members. Senior team members should lead by example and help new joiners understand the scrum process and how the objectives of holding a retrospective can be best fulfilled.

Scrum retrospective – When, Who, and For how long

The retrospective is the last event to be held in a sprint cycle. It is conducted just after a sprint review event finishes. The entire Scrum team, including the product owner and the scrum master should ideally attend the meeting. The sprint retrospective should generally last for three hours but it can be extended if required. At times, discussions may last for a longer time and so it may become necessary to extend the meeting. It is important to know that every event in Scrum is time boxed so the retrospective should not extend beyond its period.

The focus of a sprint retrospective meeting

The sprint retrospective is a very important Scrum mechanism that helps the entire team to evolve on a continuous basis. The Scrum team can improve itself with regards its core functioning, and by delivering consistent product increments through the sprint cycles. Three important questions form the basis of the entire meeting:

What happened properly or worked well?

What did not happen and what failed to work?

What further actions can be taken to improve the Scrum process?

The meeting further tries to decide what the team should:

Start doing

Stop doing

Continue doing

Key elements of a retrospective

The Scrum process is enhanced at the end of each sprint to ensure that the project team always improves in the manner it works